Idle Sands
Overview
Manage a fleet of robots cleaning up a beach. Sell the items they find and trash the rubbish. Upgrade your robots to collect more items and sweep faster.
Robot Sweepers
| Profile | Sweeper | Name | Inventory slots |
|---|---|---|---|
 |  | Beach Boy | Up to 3 inventory slots Picks up Tier 1 items |
 |  | Steel Seeker | Up to 5 inventory slots Picks up Tier 1 & 2 items |
 |  | Darude | Up to 7 inventory slots Picks up Tier 1, 2 & 3 items |
 |  | Sherlock Combs | Up to 12 inventory slots Picks up all items and no trash! |
Sellable Items
| Image | Name | Value | Image | Name | Value |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 | Bottle Cap (Tier 1) | 5 |  | Belt Buckle (Tier 3) | 80 |
 | Nail (Tier 1) | 10 |  | Cheap Ring (Tier 3) | 90 |
 | Tin Can (Tier 1) | 25 |  | Fancy Lighter (Tier 3) | 100 |
 | Steel Screw (Tier 2) | 40 |  | Broken Watch (Tier 4) | 125 |
 | Brass Key (Tier 2) | 50 |  | Water Logged Phone (Tier 4) | 150 |
 | Old Coin (Tier 2) | 60 |  | Not-So-Real Diamond Ring (Tier 4) | 200 |
Trash Crab
Give your rubbish to the Trash Crab!
We made this prototype as part of #summerslowjam hosted by @pigsquad.
Download
Development log
- V1.0.1 - Achievement UpdatesJul 17, 2023
- V1.0.0 - Release the Shoins!Jul 07, 2023
Comments
Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.
This is a really great game
And reading through the comments and seeing the complaints about balancing, you guys really did a great job fixing it. You made the incremental prices work out.
And the music. Wow, at some point I just let it play while I did some other things in my room.
Thanks a ton! Balancing still remains a bit of an issue but hopefully one day we'll give this project a revamp. Thanks for the kind words about the music.
Nice game! How can I make the screen bigger though when I download the game? The screen resize option is grayed out and pressing F4 and F5 doesn't work.
LOVE IT! great job all around, good music, cute robot drones, lots of upgrades, played for a good two days before i maxed :)
PS. if you ever decide to do an idle sands 2 or continue improving this one, i think instead of just throwing trash away you could have a recycle machine and use to research new stuff. also since we can see the ocean, would love some ocean cleaning bots that can swim/float and maybe another screen showing the ocean with new bots.
Good idle game!
What is the name of this song? Ridiculously catchy tune and a surprisingly captivating game.
Thanks a ton! Here's an mp3 of our theme song if you want it: https://www.dropbox.com/s/ten6s17x1ztmvji/Idle%20Sands%20Theme%20%28final%29.wav...
I played for way longer than i should. That just goes to show how fun this games is!
We're super super close to releasing a big balancing and bug fix. Thanks for holding tight! We appreciate your patience :)
Dang. Y'all did good. Even with the minor flubs this is still super fun. Art and music are perfect!
The items I get per minute isn't accurate... my bots collect 5 items every 14 seconds and I have 5 bots. Rather than including the interval to dig it seems to just multiply the items collected * bot amount. When in reality I actually collect 107 items/min (although technically both values are inaccurate since there's only 3 slots for the first bot but more than 3 types of items, meaning I will never fully reach that value.)
I had a lot of fun with this one :D Immaculate vibes, perfect for the summer, I love the trash crab and the robots were sooo cute! But I do think it needs a save feature as well, as it is a fairly long game! Anywho great job, I loved it a lot!! :)
I loved the art, the music and the idea.
Also, as people have pointed out in the comments, the prices are really expensive to begin with and it doesn't balance out with the rate at which you make money.
With a good balance this game can be an excellent and amazing game!
Needs a save feature
Thanks for the feedback. We'll plan that in a future update :)
as much as i love the gay crab, i really dislike the trash. sure, it makes sense that it's there, but it really just ruined the experience for me. you really can't do much about it (like maybe adding a purchasable filter that separates trash from valuable items, or a way to decrease the amount of trash you encounter? or maybe a bot specifically for trash?? i don't know), and the option to sell all trash is broken. once you do it one time, the price increases to 300 bucks, but the button still says it costs just 100 bucks. also, i know people have said this before, but the trash being unable to be dumped in the second slot REALLY screwed me up. i reloaded the page and all my progress was gone.
i definitely enjoyed this game, but i feel like the enjoyment ran out a lot more quickly than other idle games i've played.
We're hoping to launch a new update today which will most likely solve a lot of these issues. For the most part we feel it's a balancing problem we're trying to solve which will hopefully make the enjoyment last a bit longer. Stay tuned for a new update! Super big fist bumps for playing our game and leaving some feedback. It really helps us a lot! 🤜🤛
The art is so cute, and it's kind of mesmerizing to play!
🦀🤖❤️
Really like the vibe of the game. However, as other people mentioned, the balance seems a bit off. Considering that you get the most valuable item in all the times, you will need to wait almost 2min to be able to add another robot. Or 7min to do the first upgrade on the robot. Considering that the game starts with the guy that we should improve the robot, it’s quite frustating. But I really believe that with some balance, this game has a amazing potential.
Thank you so much for taking the time to play our game! We've also seen those issues with upgrade/bot cost vs playtime. We're currently working on a major balance change that will hopefully solve this issue :D
Game mechanics do not seem to make much sense.
Why does price increase for the item slots according to the number of bots ? Now it just forces to buy the slots first and only if you got all of them buy bots. annoying.
Auto-Sell does not make much sense right now. Since the slot might fill up with trash, you want a value item stay there until eventually you got enough items to buy another update. Unfortunately before you are able to notice that auto-sell will actually force you to do more work, you already bought it and there is no way to disable it.
Thanks for your feedback! We wanted everything in the game to feel incremental but our balancing is a bit off. We'll also balance the amount of trash that players start off with as right now it feels a bit frustrating and unfair. We appreciate you playing our game and cleaning up some digital beaches!
Need hard and soft resets and also export/import buttons.
Thanks for your feedback!
I love the music! The game's also very addicting :D I kind of wish buying new bots added slots in rows, so you could see all the inventories at the same time instead of clicking on the bots though, but that's my only nitpick. Awesome job!
Thanks for the feedback :) We'll try implement your suggestion.
- weird pric scaling, but only with slots,
- cant sell trash in second slot,
i like this game
We're going to work on that today! Thanks for playing our game and cleaning up the beaches of Itch.
Auto-sell very buggy... (Price with different bots raise-up in a strange way, and slots sell not only within active slot, but other bots slots too)
And slot unlocks grow in price when i buy more bots. (May be bug too?)
We agree! The auto-sell should be less buggy in tomorrows build. We had to rush a bit at the end so we couldn't test it out as much as we would have liked. We programmed the slot unlocks to grow in price when you buy a bot - but once again, we didn't get a chance to properly play test it. Thanks for the feedback!
what a fun way to kill time!
Thanks for killing time with us! A digital beach is now a lot cleaner!
I'd like to feature this in a blog post about some of the most quirky recent cosy games, if you're cool with that?
Hey @EIDizzle, Absolutely. We're going to be releasing an updated build in the next couple of hours which has some major bug fixes. But we'd love to be featured on your blog.
Great, what's the best way I can contact you?
Best place would be https://www.studiobolland.com/contact (our emails should be linked there),